The building was about to burst. The people were about to explode. So much about the Nets these past few years has been so frustrating, so exasperating. They have three of the most rare, most wonderful talents in all of basketball running the floor together. They generate all this energy, all this light, all this basketball fire.

And yet, over the course of three years, all they have to show for this are two playoff series victories, and far too few moments that you’ll want to press between the pages of your basketball scrapbook.

One was brewing now. You could sense it. You could taste it. Vince Carter had the basketball in his hands, and if he’d been maddeningly inconsistent across the length and width of this series with the Cavaliers so far, you still understood one thing: this Heir to Air had to have a Nets playoff moment in him. Didn’t he?

“Two-man game,” Nets coach Lawrence Frank said. “Jason [Kidd] and Vince. You want to put yourself in the best position where he can do a lot of things with it, a quick shot, a drive. We got him the ball at the elbow, where it’s tight. He’s the guy, we want the ball in his hands.”

On the other side of the floor, that other Heir to Air, LeBron James, was stewing. He’d scored 30 points and carried the Cavs, but he’d missed a batch of fourth-quarter free throws, missed a bunch of late jumpers. He’d had his chance to seize a Jordanesque moment, and failed.

Now it was Carter’s turn.

Only now, as Carter started to back in, as the clock began to melt away too quickly, the electricity inside the Meadowlands turned to something else. Suddenly, in its place was this nervous, nebulous dread, a tangible agony.

“Shoot the ball, Vince!” a panicked voice cried out.

Eric Snow was guarding Carter, and doing it well. Then Larry Hughes came over, and now there were four hands tangling with Carter’s and the clock was still melting away furiously, and the scoreboard overhead still sneered that it was Cavs 87, Nets 85.

And now . . .

The ball was loose, it was on the floor, and it ticked off Carter’s fingers. There was still a tangle of legs it had to avoid before it rolled across the sidelines, but the Meadowlands understood what was happening here. The Nets weren’t going to retain possession. They weren’t going to hold serve. They were going to reduce their season, this third season of the Big Three, to 48 hours. They could be packing bags by Thursday afternoon.

“I thought,” Carter said, “we were looking at overtime.”

There would be no overtime because the Nets had failed to seize control of the game when it was eminently seizable, because they’d allowed the Cavaliers to come back after it looked as if the Nets had shooed them away. And now, you have to wonder if this is all we’re going to get from the Big Three. Because you have to wonder if this is as good as it can ever get for the Big Three.

In a few weeks, Rod Thorn will have to make some hard decisions about whether to keep this nucleus intact. Kidd, Carter and Richard Jefferson make basketball a joy to watch sometimes. Maybe that can be enough across the long season, maybe it can be enough in January and February. But this is the third straight postseason now where it wasn’t nearly enough in April and May. As enjoyable as it all looks and sounds and feels in the cold of winter, it’s all so very anticlimactic in the growing warmth of spring.

Last night, the Big Three shot 48 times, made only 11 of them. If not for Mikki Moore and his 25 points, this could have been uglier than Christopher Moltisanti’s demise Sunday night on “The Sopranos.” As elegant as the basketball can look when all of them are clicking, that’s how egregious it can look when they aren’t.

Right to the end, two-man game, Kidd and Carter, Carter and Kidd, outdone by Snow and Hughes. A ball on the ground, the Meadowlands feeling like a deflated basketball all of a sudden. Time melting off the clock. And the Big Three suddenly on it.